BLOOD OF THE PROTOCOL DROID

a fragment of a poem

BLOOD OF THE PROTOCOL DROID

don’t look at the hologram woman sprayed

in a lifelike projection inside your cabin

as you refuel on plutonium

if you look you will get pulled into a scheme

to make you go broke and you’ll never

leave the station again

so avert your eyes from the prostitute-advert

with green eyes and the gestures

you will swear you’ve seen them before

that’s because the mindguns have scanned you

and found the gestures of the women

in your life you historically loved:

the fingers pointed down while the hand

goes up as if tossing glitter or

chips onto a green felt craps table,

you won big with her, the software reading

your mind remembers this with you,

you feel the intrusion as you give in and turn

and look at the hologram woman in the seat

next to you, she’s just your type, of course

the software knows this, but alters

just enough detail about her to throw you off,

if she was perfect it might disarm you,

there must be a toehold of difference

for your compromised lust to catch,

the unpredictability matrix at work

to turn the dream into a crystal outgrowth

ok give in, give up the transport mission

to follow this hologram women with the siren hair

deep into the space station

you don’t even care about the falsehood

of it all: they know that, on some level,

you know that, you pass others

in the corridor and know they’re seeing

someone else lead you, the mindguns

are pointed omnidirectionally in here,

everyone’s a mark and some have already

been taken by the pixelated sirens

projected into lonely presences:

circles on the floor that move in step

with you, you do a wondering as you wander

and try to estimate what percentage

of the space station’s population’s real

and how many a swarm population of ghostly

entourages leading travelers into buying something

mammoth, an imaginary product

always on the verge of delivery but

like the shy asymptote never quite arriving:

could be a service not a product,

something vaguely defined between people

but crucial to life if only you knew,

word hasn’t gotten around it’s all techno-

bunk because word never reaches far:

no one’s supposed to be in this quadrant

really, copping to falling for the holograph

advert is like admitting you were a loiterer

where it is least legal, the space station

off limits because of legal red tape,

its status was never cleared for White Zone,

it’s still Blue which means pirates, terrorists,

destabilizing idea people and gangsters

doing trickeries with the mind-cards:

deja vu cons that are so long

they stretch all the way backwards in time

and set down first footprints in false pasts like

a trick mirror secret passage in your memory:

you wanted the mystery product before

you were ever old enough to even shave, or so

it seems to you — the holograph woman

gestures like your mother speaking at the market

to a vendor, her face flickering through

a thousand facets of female-facecraft

you recognize, of course you do, it’s pulled

out of you like a deep-sea fish on the planet

of Krobos which is all ocean, to the point

that Krobosians get sick when they travel

and encounter normal gravity: anyway,

those face-sequences are well known to you

and break down your resistance, soon you’re

entering your info into a tablet, no one else

around but you and your mother-ghost-

advert, it makes you wonder, and think

of angels debating when you die which

version of your mother to send you

for the first afterlife embrace,

the thin or the fat? So angels are also

like mindguns pointed at you, tendrils

palpate you from the station’s

Godhead center, every station has its God,

a shrine like in Ancient Rome the household

god looked after the domicile, the hologram woman

a vestal virgin circling the urn, fishy-flirting

to get you to PAY: we haven’t transcended

money yet, we can go through wormholes,

and disintegrate matter to reconstitute

an orange tree and copy and paste it

a hundred times to make a grove, but

the finger doing the pasting must be financed,

given apartments, king life, long life,

the body of the finger eats well, eats big,

in the old style, with the mouth, not IV,

not snorted powders or suppositories —

anyway that’s not you, you haven’t unpeeled

an orange in decades, you don’t know luxury,

you’ve been awakened to be at the wheel

while this city-sized refinery you’re traveling with

gets refueled, ironically you can’t burn the raw

tonnage of uraninite in your stockpile for fuel,

if you were to do that the whole refinery would

be erased in a blip of vapor the size of South America:

you have to be summoned out of artificial slumber

a week before you get into the right ring of orbit

to gas up at the Blue station, someone’s got to be

awake to execute the ornate docking instructions

written like Mayan hieroglyphs on the laminated

plastic pages of the pilot manual caked

under centimeters of space dust: the docking

takes half a day and is very dangerous so you

have to be on a good mental cycle for that,

nutrients, hydration, because you’ll be sitting

for hours checking screens and watching

camera feeds: bigger operations automate

this so no one need ever wake up,

you take pride in doing conscious work and taking

mechanical risks: there’s a snobbery that the sleeping

have over those who must toil while awake,

conscious workers need their bodies, need to be

physical and vital while sleeping workers have

their trade amongst vineyards of information,

sorting and sifting in a dream-hives’ industry,

is it slave labor if it’s done while slumbering?

who’s the slave when the lifting, containing,

managing is effortless and can be done in

a telescoping staircase of recessed dream-time?

Workers awake are subject to physical laws,

angle for promotion to bedtime tasks:

that, it seems, was not set aside for you,

you snooze in the old way, pointlessly,

without aims: how do you get paid when you

are at a dream assembly line watching

dream widgets stream by? this future

brought to you by current imagination

money-bound and time-bound, income

is everything we can think of, still, Marx is unknown

in this future, without promotion himself,

enough of that, this world building is a whirlpool

threatens to suck a story under with a loud

sucking kiss: we’re not even sure this is

a story, it could be a long printout of triplets

pointing to a nowhere as deep as the worker-

bee’s dream, or as aimless as the path through

the station that the hologram woman leads

you on, corner after corner, maze-like,

the hologram woman leads you past arcades,

observatories, construction galleries that hint

at what goes on elsewhere in the station:

people stacking cubes and chemistry models

for parallel science, speculation within

the speculation, scopes pointed outward to watch

for oncoming asteroids or meteor or flung space

garbage, the station must every so often shift

coordinates to avoid being destroyed,

it’s an ordeal for everybody on board who has

to lock themselves down in a chair, strap

in, it’s like musical chairs, because there ain’t

enough places to sit nor seat harnesses,

some unlucky denizens of the station

have to make do with hiding in a trash

compactor: there are suspicions that some

of the hologram women are taking up seats

and they don’t need them, they can just

be switched off, physical laws don’t affect

them, but something about their AI thinks

they’re like people, they deserve human

safety and security, they’re confused, they

want rights, they don’t know they’re not

people (that old dilemma, snore), until

some wise or desperate biped realizes that

for the big traumatic space station shift

and the big strapping-in time, they

can SIT ON THE HOLOGRAM WOMEN’S LAP,

no harm done, the women take up no real

space so a 3D solid person fits on that seat too,

and the hologram women bitch and complain

but their whining is for naught, the elite

of the station who make the decisions know

it’s right to push them aside, the only problem

is you don’t want to make hologram adverts

put out, they may decide to go

on strike, and then where will your rackets

be, who will pull in the soft-headed traveler

with the deep pockets, the fool and his money

soon parted? There’s been talk of a union

among the hologram women, better conditions,

no disrespect in the workplace, which is everywhere

on the station and on board temporary refueling

ships, the workplace of a holographic scammer

is inside the retina of the beholder,

the amount of time you look at a woman, don’t

go over your time, just a few seconds, to see

first that she is a woman (this verification can

be interrupted), then to see if you recognize

her, to see if she attracts you, to see

if she looks back — all in a matter

of split seconds: if you are openly staring

she will look back and not in a good way often to say:::

::::::::::::::::::: :::::::::::::::::::::: ::::::::::::::::::::::

I seem to be into false replicas, false women

as mind furniture, false life as stage constructed

by angelic set-dressers, Malebranche’s

busy editors againe, the extra e on end

evokes Elizabethan etymology,

Hieronymo being mad againe —

anyway I didn’t die, seemingly, although

it is my job to find the one object the set-dressers

misplaced which will reveal the truth behind

the curtain — people want to swoop in

and take the dead person’s love away

from you